Gatsby raises $15m to drive the reinvention of web development

Gatsby’s open source framework is used by companies including Nike, Airbnb, PayPal and Braun.

On Thursday (26 September), Berkeley-based web development platform Gatsby announced that it has raised $15m in Series A funding.

The round was led by CRV. Previous investors include Trinity Ventures, Mango Capital, Fathom Capital and Dig Ventures. Kong CEO Augusto Marietti and Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky also contributed to the fund. Prior to the Series A funding, Gatsby raised $3.8m in its seed round.

Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build “blazing fast” websites and apps, and is used by companies including Airbnb, Nike, PayPal and Braun.

Hundreds of thousands of developers have adopted Gatsby’s content mesh platform since it was open sourced four years ago. The company claims that around 1pc of the top 10,000 websites on the internet are using its technology.

Investment plans

With the funding, Gatsby plans to grow its global team. At present there are 35 people working for the start-up, with plans to hire dozens more remote workers around the world.

The company also said it will be investing heavily in building cloud services that complement its open source product.

In a blogpost, it said: “Modern software development work relies heavily on services from cloud vendors. Our cloud services help people quickly set up and run sites, and enable website teams, including both technical and non-technical people, to collaborate easily together. The services will be free for personal sites and must-haves for organisations.”

The company is now in open beta for its new CMS Preview service. It also announced plans to invest $3m in open source every year, including on the Gatsby core and official plugins, and the company’s learning materials.

‘Reinventing website tech’

In the blogpost, Gatsby founder Kyle Mathews added: “Gatsby was founded around a big idea, and that idea is starting to go mainstream. We believe that the basic architecture of websites is being reinvented.

“The dominant web architecture, the LAMP stack, was founded at the dawn of the web before paradigm-shifting technologies were invented, like virtual machines, AWS, smartphones, Git, Node/NPM, React and Serverless – elements of modern engineering we now take for granted.

“With Gatsby, we’re reinventing website technology so people can create sites that are lightning fast, incredibly secure and stable.”